Clear sight lines from officer workspaces inside the port building to the vehicle processing areas under the canopies outside allow security needs to be met with few border-control officers. Openings in the roof canopy admit daylight to the space underneath; after sunset, artificial lighting is projected through the perforated aluminum ceiling panels.

The Van Buren Land Port of Entry is located on a narrow, 21-acre site that used to serve as a rail yard. The surrounding forested areas inspired the patterning on the silk-screened glazing, which sits flush with metal panels to form a taut skin around the building forms.

Site: A 21-acre former rail yard along the St. John River in Van Buren, Maine.

Program: A 41,000-square-foot border-control station comprising three structures, with inspection checkpoints, a warehouse, office space, and support facilities.

Solution: A border-control station isn’t typically a place that anyone is happy to encounter, but the jury responded with uniform approval to this austere checkpoint on a remote site in northeastern Maine—along the Canadian frontier—designed by Julie Snow Architects. “It’s very close to what a typical federal building might look like—a not very good one from the ’60s—and yet it’s very good, through very subtle moves,” juror Lisa Iwamoto said. That sentiment was shared by juror William Rawn. “It doesn’t feel nefarious. It actually feels welcoming,” he said.

Large glass planes and rough steel walls balance the project’s opposed programmatic requirements of surveillance and concealment. Several jurors commented on the “porosity” of the design, both in terms of its materials and its efficient planning. “Driving up to the building, it’s very legible,” said juror Zoë Ryan. Agents can monitor the checkpoints from various locations throughout the site, allowing for reduced staffing.

Outdoor checkpoint zones are covered by a large canopy, necessary given the extreme weather conditions in northern Maine, and protected by an anodized aluminum rainscreen. These spaces—with warm light radiating from behind perforated aluminum panels at night, and during the day, natural light reflecting through skylights lined with bright-dipped aluminum—create liminal effects for those making the passage from one nation to another. Inside the pavilions, the warm tones are carried over to foster a congenial workspace for officers on duty in a harsh climate.

For all its opacity, the jurors were impressed with the station’s aesthetic of restraint and its intentionally camouflaged placement in the landscape. The three barlike pavilions are clad in vertical panels of glass and steel that form a simple repetitive pattern. All surfaces are flush, to add a sense of unity to the façades. In plan, the structures are pragmatically disposed in the shape of a “z.” “It has a really abstract quality,” Iwamoto said.

The facility, budgeted by the U.S. General Services Administration at $30 million and designed to LEED Gold standards, has its own water-filtration system and generates its own heat from a ground-coupled pump. The pavilions are set with great sensitivity between stands of birch, marsh grasses, and a stone-lined swale. “I think the landscape treatments are used to great effect,” juror Steve Dumez said. “What they’ve been able to do is introduce landscape and topography that really breaks up the scale and modulates it so that it’s very clear about where you go. It’s really good.”